The Michelle Factor: Forget Jeremiah Wright. What Does Michelle Obama Think About America?

Whether or not the issue of Barack Obama's two decades under the spiritual direction of Jeremiah Wright remains an issue through the next six months, the views of the possible First Lady at his side will be part of this half-year's discussion.

Read it. Listen to it. This is not a speech from the mainstream of American politics. It is a radical critique of the country, and it is not the sort of assessment widely shared beyond the far precincts of the left.

Here are just a few of the key assertions Michelle Obama makes:

But we’ve also learned something else this year, something that we’ve all sort of felt at some point in our life, that we’re still living in a nation, and in a time when the bar is set, I talk about this all the time, they set the bar. They say look, if you do these things, you can get to this bar, right? And then you work and you struggle, you do everything that they say, and you think you’re getting close to the bar and you’re working hard, and you’re sacrificing, and then you get to the bar, you’re right there, you’re reaching out for the bar, you think you have it, and then what happens? They move the bar. They raise it up. They shift it to the left and to the right. It’s always just quite out of reach. And that’s a little bit of what Barack has been experiencing. The bar is constantly changing for this man. Raise the money? Not enough. Build an organization? Not enough. Win a whole bunch of states? Not the right states. You got to win certain states. So the bar has been shifting and moving in this race, but the irony is, the sad irony is that that’s exactly what’s happening to most Americans in this country. The bar is shifting and moving on people all the time. And folks are struggling like never before, working harder than ever, believing that their hard work will lead to some reward, some payoff. But what they find is that they get there and the bar has changed, things are different, wasn’t enough. So you have to work even harder.